Creating up to 50 free Windows Azure Web Sites in a single subscription

December 3, 2012 - 12:23 pm

When Windows Azure Web Sites were announced during the Meet Windows Azure event (June 7th, 2012) the preview version was only available in the East US region. The pricing details page explained what you would get for free per month:

Windows Azure Web Sites allowed you to run 10 web sites for free, Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman even blogged about it. But a lot has changed since then. In September Microsoft announced the shared model (between free and reserved) which added support for CNAMEs, A-Records and naked domains. And the support for multiple regions also improved over the last few months. Today you can deploy your Windows Azure Web Site to 5 different regions: East US, West US, East Asia, West Europe, North Europe.

If you look at the pricing details page, you’ll see that the content for free Web Sites also changed:

With the Windows Azure Web Sites free instance model, you will receive the following at no charge:
- 10 free web sites per sub region* on the AzureWebSites.net domain
- 165 MB of outbound data per day per sub region, up to 5 GB per region**; unlimited inbound data
- 1 GB of storage per sub region (shared by all web sites)
- 20 MB of a third-party MySQL database per sub region for the first 12 months (charges may apply thereafter)

You are now allowed to run 10 free web sites per subregion. Since Windows Azure Web Sites (Preview) is available in 5 regions this means you can create up to 50 free Web Sites. The only thing you’ll need to look after is that you choose a different region when you hit the 10 sites limit.

Here is an example of 30 free Web Sites I created over 3 different regions: